>> good evening ladies and gentleman to the 500th anniversary of machiavelli "the prince" named james johnson from the department of history this is one of three moments the department is marking of landmarks in

history we embarked the 50th anniversary of the cuban missile crisis and later the martin luther king speech at the lincoln memorial. we have invited to gas who are suited to do what we want to do to look at the past in its own terms edward muir one of their premier historians and michael ignatieff a thinker, a writer, a public figure engaged in global affairs and politics. suppress is the starkest anatomy of power is without fear to show rulers how to

survive in the world as it is and not as it should be. the only criteria is success success, goodness, justice, honesty, of virtue of available only if they help you '60s -- succeed and if not you should neglect them to be honest and just then to me so and one should not hesitate do deceived or do whatever else is necessary to hold power this is on the means of power. people should either be harassed or crushed to do minor damage they get revenge but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do so do it in a way you do not have to fear their vengeance.

this is a book that talks about cruelty will use stamps were used it talks about cultivating an enemy see you can crush him publicly to intimidate other people. machiavelli rights to get a secure hold on a new territory you merely be to eliminate the surviving members of the family of the previous thrillers. this is the first modern book on politics that is what underlies he venations that states the laws are purely human artifacts for human and relentlessly secular and mentions moses use the example of the leader coming to power through his own authority

and it promises to describe how things are in the real world and not waste time in the discussion with them an imaginary world in order to live up to the idea they were taught to destroy themselves a gives a particular view machiavelli writes humans are ungrateful comical, deceptive, avoiders of danger, eager to gain and it is normal to take things that do not belong to you and sketches a few of they cannot control our fate even the best prepared to go and

get the best path of the time and controls the rest but favors the of gold. it was the lack of all moral evaluation. how do we read it? with the strategy or is the author himself implicated more lee by writing, without this approval about the effectiveness of the assassination or a correction, colonization and unnecessary atrocities? >> other silence in the book whether moral laws to transcend the pursuit of

power of any particular state, the status of the recall universal human rights such silence takes us from renaissance italy to global politics. the book, the independence of nations it invokes one to describe what he calls a jumble of world politics. he says if god does not exist than anything is permitted. in these circumstances people ought to act out of self-interest even if it leads to crime. this is the true definition about states at their worst they are beast that runs a jumble of realpolitik is kidding when they're hungry but no paying laws of the

nature were they have the terrible words to ring true anything is permitted. to read "the prince" to dave for it -- forces us to think of machiavelli in the global context in the jungle of world politics. it may mean a slowdown milosevic employed on serbia. mass murder deportation, rape as a strategy of war, political assassination, it may make us question the grounds on which we claim they are crimes against humanity. reading "the prince" may put us in my national security invasion of iraq, water boarding, a drone strikes,

the readers have passed such questions over the past 500 years in ways that make sense to them many new the author only by his book and condemned him accordingly burned by the jesuits 1559 the book was put on the index of prohibited books that same year, a 1559 id removed a 1990. "the prince" was called britain by satan stand. in the 20th century machiavelli has been called the teacher of evil and associated with the nazis. but to steady machiavelli in his own time gives a different sense of the man raised by people of humble means to valued books and was a voracious reader as a

child and wrote whenever he took a walk he had a book by john tate tucked under his arm and a man who claimed to have the imaginary conversations at the end of a long day was a scholar, poet, playwright, a fiercely loyal to the city of florence and a member of its government under the republic and an eloquent defender of engaged citizenry. machiavelli signed a letter this way, historian, a comic doctor, and tragic author author, niccolo machiavelli. the particular circumstances of his rating "the prince" 1513 may be relevant the republican had fallen

and the almost being restored to power machiavelli was out of a job and he wrote this book at of the forward it to the rest of the medici as a recommendation. this is the context to study the silences of the press to read between the lines of there is a deeper message to the book some have concluded it is an attack on tear in a chronicling the crimes of the desperate so careful readers will draw their own right conclusions. some have seen this as a defense of a rule of = and even as catholics have likened it to the subversive martin luther to denounce it protestants read it as a journey of catholicism during the french revolution

people said this embodied the ideals of the revolution by issuing tyranny was meant to overthrow. to say "the prince" has been all things to all people within the last 500 years it has been many more things to many more kinds of people than simple tone may suggest a and one of the greatest departments including philosophy your political science religion and many others. those who have talked machiavelli know that it can cause outrage. those of us who have read the scholarship know that it provides original is surprising reading. but perhaps the dominant reading is neither outrage were original insight perhaps it is a breezy

acceptance when that skates over puzzlement or worried but perhaps an attitude that we flatter ourselves with our sophistication, worldliness that says we have seen this before to take in stride to use some future epsilon the way here are recent trips with machiavelli in the title. management with machiavelli. a prescription for success. machiavelli for women. [laughter] this is from the dust jacket from intimacy from competitors to lovers the greatest power belongs to the woman who'd ears to use this subtle weapons that are hers alone.

machiavelli for moms. [laughter] on the effective government of children. even in 2013 over 2013 especially we should not be complacent about this book after 500 years it is still potent and still possibly dangerous and still rich in the silence and still deceptively simple and still affecting and forcing us to consider what is right and wrong with the exercise of power domestically and globally. we're fortunate this evening to have to engage and thoughtful commentators on this book. the first is professor edward muir among handful of modern historians who have redefined the field, a

pioneer of cultural history looking at the details of everyday life and the nature of hierarchies and their reach of the institution and fines meticulous and detailed research of vision across social science to lick it group behavior, a human psychology in the meaning of virtual. to put of violence comer been ceremonies and festivals, theatergoers and learned societies. michael ignatieff from northwestern university in chicago recognized for his teaching by the mccormick professorship teaching excellence and the author of four books and numerous articles who has co-authored or edited another five books, the recipient of many

prizes including the american historical association prize for the best book in history for his book civic ritual that is now a classic and the prize for the best book in a time in history has received that twice for his book. . .

you have heard some already. fortune is director, leonardo da vinci and niccolo machiavelli's negatives and dreamed to change history. this is about a plan to deviate the arnold river. fortune is a woman gender and politics and nicholo machiavelli ,-com,-com ma machiavelli in modern leadership similar to to one of the titles that jim mentioned. why machiavelli's iron rule --

ours important now. machiavelli's virtue, machiavellian love, machiavellian held. i also found 113,000 hits on google scholar which is who were machiavelli and books and articles and that of course leaves out many things in foreign languages which presents us with such a difficult problem of how do we make sense of a man who wrote a deceptively simple book that has been interpreted in so many different ways. is machiavelli as the late 16th century equivalent of the devil? my grandmother who was full of all kinds of old-fashioned used to when she was angry with mike brothers and i used to say get the nick out of your pants i had

no idea which he was talking about until i became a scholar and realized it was machiavelli. he was there all along. you see the most sexual or sexist. let me read you one of the most famous passages in the prince. at the end of chapter 25. i'm certainly convinced of this, that it is better to be impetuous than cautious because fortune is a woman and it is necessary in order to keep her down, to beat her and to struggle with her. and it is seen that she wore off and allows to be taken over by men who are impetuous than by those who make cold advances and then being a woman she is always the friend of young men, for they are less cautious, more aggressive and they command her

with more audacity. so are we to understand this is a metaphor to understand politics? or is he in fact, as i think most of my colleagues who specialize would say, isn't that dedicated republican, a dedicated believer in not what we would call democracy certainly but in the liberty of the citizenry to exercise its own individual and collective will, and that is basically what i want to argue tonight. and i will try and prove that in a few ways here. first let me put it in a rotter context and borrowing this context from the late william bounds my and historian of renaissance thought. who understood renaissance republicanism and in fact the renaissance itself as a

manifestation of one side of a radical dichotomy and i coined from him to put the matter briefly, it is between the 13th and 17th centuries western europeans and perhaps italians most directly work torn between two largely antithetical modes of perceiving reality end of quote. loath modes employed the word republic of our republic, the commonweal. once was the republican christiana that universal community of a divinely created hierarchical order body in the roman catholic church and headed by the pope and the other was civic republicanism that particular manifestation of a political order and in particular time and place, which was embodied typically in the statutes and customs of the local regimes, what we might now call constitutions.

browse my label this first part of the dichotomy medieval and the second renaissance. but he did not intend these two labels to be historical periods but in fact ideal types as a way of helping us to understand the nature of this conflict, to ideal types that he sees as having existed in a tension with one another. quote the crucial difference between the two positions was an utterly different conception of the general order -- the general nature of order. every other difference between them can be related to this. it's all about order. the medieval position placed every element of human experience within a caustic order a defendant has patterned hierarchically unchanging and ideal which ranks things, values

and persons higher or lower. any change violated this universal order and was there more empire is a moral indefensible? the renaissance was in contrast to fail to perceive any coherence in the universe, rejected hierarchy as a principle and instead of faces perceived only the influx of things. a principle rooted fundamentally in history in the notion of change. one system was closed and in general the other opened. renaissance republicanism, civic republicanism in contrast to the medieval position did not identify the substance of human nature as the intellect but as the will. this is most clear in machiavelli of all renaissance.

a man who celebrated the free exercise of the will under the conditions of political liberty. not only in his famous book about republics discourses but also in a very interesting way throughout "the prince." as bousma put it, the renaissance republicanism saw no structure in the nature of things, no clear gradations of value, no ground for classified some elements of the universe is higher and others is lower, no reason accessible to man for affirming that reality consisted of a system of unchanging forms and that the fluidity of common experience could be dismissed as meaningless. inconsistency, contradiction and paradox as insurmountable and it's precisely those three

additions that i think are so at the down and machiavelli's contradiction and paradox, something that did not bother him and in fact something that he celebrated. one of the particular interesting things i think we discovered in recent years about "the prince" is that it is really part of just a segment, an ongoing dialogue in particular at dialogue that machiavelli was having with his friend francesco vittori whose correspondence between machiavellian vittori has recently been examined by john and jamie in a brilliant book called friends and it's quite clear from his letters beginning about 500 years ago this month through the rest of 2013 that machiavelli was thinking about two books, first the discourses

of the 10-k decade for wednesday which is the book he started to write about republics and then he interrupted that and started to write "the prince." so the princes wedged within the writing of a book about republics and liberty and he talks about how his thinking evolves in these letters with vittori and so that in many ways he sees maybe not as a finished product but as yet one more letter, one more open-ended segment in an ongoing dialogue between friends. not as a type of philosophical treatise he as has often been understood and taught, but as a dialogue. now who was machiavelli? as jim has mentioned, he comes from a really prominent but not

most distinguished family. they weren't aristocrats, but they had -- the machiavelli's produced 54 pryor's up to nicholo's's time which meant they were city councilman and they had strong republican traditions within the family. geronimo had been jailed, tortured and executed three generations before nicholo and francesco wrote treatises against civic freedom. this was a world that's niccolo machiavelli inherited. his own father was a rather bookish lawyer, ineffectual, impoverished, really one of the lesser lights in the machiavelli clan, who had in some ways made

a little money by writing indexes for other books including he gained some degree of interest in books from his father. his interest in politics from the family that had long admitted to political behavior but at the same time he was no longer really in the mainstream of florentine. his own family, he was married and he had seven children halloween -- although we know despite the fact he was reasonably affectionate with his wife numerous affairs and madly in love with the quarters on it one time and his letters as i think the passes i just read from "the prince" indicates displayed a deep ambivalence about women, about trusting them and about their influence in the political world. throughout "the prince" for example he is always warning "the prince" not to appear to be effeminate.

let me talk just a bit about his political career and what that might help us understand what happens in "the prince." machiavelli is born in 1469 and is a young man it was a period of the hegemony of medici. beginning in 1434 and between 1434 and 1494 the medici family first cosmo medici and then his son, grandson and great-grandson control the city of florence even though they virtually never held significant public office. florence was a republic. to hold office in florence he had to be a member of the guild. a formal country aristocrat in exile back in the 1290s. there's a list of 150 names of families and if you have that last thing you can't walk through the gates of the city of

florence because of their anti-aristocraaristocra tic tendencies but by the middle of the 15th century rich bankers such as medici were able to subvert that republican to control everything from behind-the-scenes. so as more important diplomats came to florence in the 14 30s and 40s and 50's they would go to the town hall and present their credentials and then get out of there as fast as they could, walked down the street and go over to the medici palace where the real work took place. now what this is, and i think what the situation, this historical situation contribute to machiavelli sought was a radical distinction between authority and power. machiavelli when he contemplates that period and this is typical throughout "the prince" that it doesn't matter what your title is or how you -- or what authority you have. what matters is how you exercise your power.

micciche had no authority at all in power. in 1494 they blew it. they failed to protect florence from the invasion of the french are exiled and replaced by a charismatic profit, who becomes an ecclesiastical dictator also from behind-the-scenes. he was controlling things from the pulpit. there are still elections and their still a a republic officially but baca valley saw him as shifty a liar and irrational and the experience for machiavelli and his generation was really the informative experience for him. it was for his generation much perhaps as the vietnam war was for the baby boomer generation in this country, as perhaps 9/11 is for my own students.

after solana rollo was arrested and burned in 1598, and you can still see the spot in the piazza where it was marked where he was burned within three weeks machiavelli gets a job. he had applied for this job several times and admin churck m.. as soon as he is out of the way he is elected as second chancellor, a job he held for 15 years and a job in which he was clearly known as the man, the servant of the most powerful member of the florentine republic. he became an outsider on the inside of the second grade power. he went on numerous diplomatic missions to france in the roman

empire, to the papacy into venice and most famously was florence's representative to valentina where he directly observe attempts to conquer rome on yet. he writes back letters virtually every day from the various diplomatic missions to florence. he is never the ambassador. he is the guy behind the scenes who does the nitty-gritty negotiations while the ambassador goes to fancy banquets and niccolo is down in the kitchen with the other representatives and servants of other representatives who really figures out what's going on. andy writes extraordinarily frank letters from france back home to florence. he writes, the french respect only those who are willing to fight or to pay and since you have shown yourselves incapable of either they consider usurers

as mr. zero. he had to manipulate, yet to control to find information of value and i must say i spent my career reading diplomatic reports and when you read machiavelli's letters ,-com,-com ma they are stunning. not only is the probably the best prose stylist of the time of this period, but in letter letter after letter there's this analytical quality in which he is looking at what is at stake and where the sources of power are for florence. it's not just gossip or who is going to fight who as you find in so many diplomatic reports. its analysis all the time. binnun 1512, the method to she returned to power and republic overflows -- overthrows and this time they don't even bother with with -- and machiavellian loses his job.

he is accused of conspiracy against minucci and his name is on a list of potential conspirators. he is arrested and tortured but eventually released and retires to his farm ,-com,-com ma where you can go today to see the house and see the tavern across the street where he hung out. it was there that his literary career takes off and of course "the prince" and the discourse and numerous other works but he found this prospect especially in the first year the year he is writing the prince deeply depressing. i feel useless to myself, to my relatives, to my friends. but it's that depressed state that he describes his writing of "the prince" to his old friend francesco vittori, probably the most famous letter written in

the renaissance. it is a letter in which he talks about his day collecting wood to sell back to his own friends in florence and how they cheat him about catching birds to feed his family and how we spent the afternoon with an innkeeper, up butcher a miller into baker's gambling and they fight over their wages. and then at the end of the evening this famous passage about him returning home. when the evening comes i returned to my home and i go into my study and on the threshold i take off my everyday clothes which are covered with mud and mire. and i put on curio robes. i assume these were his old robes of office. interest in a more appropriate manner. i enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly. and there i taste the food that

alone is mine and for which i was born. and there i am not ashamed to speak, to ask them their reasons for their actions and daythey, in their humanity, answer me and for four hours i feel no boredom. i do not tremble at the thought nor do i longer fear poverty. i become completely part of them. this is of course the renaissance fantasy. it begins in many ways and is underpriced by writing letters to cicero who had been dead for 1342 years and machiavelli is engaged in the same tint as the game of the conversation with the ancients.

it's reading is what he is doing but he describes it as a conversation and he is describing this to vittori his good friend with whom he is also maintaining a conversation and the dialogue. and as dante says knowledge does not exist without the retention of it by memory. i have noted down what i've learned from their conversations and i compose a little work. the prince, where i delve as deeply as they can into thoughts on the subject. discussing what a principality is, what kinds there aren't how they are acquired and how they are maintained and why they are lost. so in some ways it's an open-ended kind of book, but that doesn't have the final answers. let me just briefly in concluding here turned to one of the core chapters.

the most famous parts of the book and the ones that are the most disturbing perhaps our chapter 16, 17 and 18, where he asks these binary questions. is it better to be generous or to be miserly? the answer is miserly. is it better to be loved or to be feared and the answer is figured. is it better to be cruel or merciful? certainly not merciful but only cruel up to a point. is it better to be a fox or a lion? the answer, both. and then we come to this famous part, perhaps the part that has generated the most controversy in the literature and let me read it to you so everyone is clear about what we are talking about. i want you to notice a few things. first, the repetition of the word necessity or necessary.

that is a guide to how he is thinking. therefore it is not necessary for a prince to have all of the above-mentioned qualities although these are the virtues, but it is very necessary for him to appear to have them. furthermore i shall be so bold as to assert this, that having them and practicing them at all times is harmful and appearing to have them is useful. for instance to seem merciful, faithful, humane, fourth light, religious and to be so but his mind should be disposed of such a way that should it become necessary not to be so, he will be able to know how to change it to the contrary. in other words, a kind of instinctive pragmatispragmatis m and it is essential to understand this. that it prints and especially a

new prince cannot observe all those things by which men are considered good, for in order to maintain the state he is often obliged in italian to act against charity, against humanity and against reason and therefore it is necessary that he have a mind ready to turn itself according to the ways of the winds of fortune and the changeability of affairs requiring it and as i said above, as long as it is possible he should not stray from the good but he should know how to enter into evil by necessity and again the word necessity, commands. a prince therefore must be very careful never to let anything slip from his lips which is the five qualities mentioned above. he should appear upon seeing and

hearing him to be all marcie, all kindness, all religion. and there is nothing more necessary than to seem to possess this last and that his religion. so far we have got necessity, we have to appear one way and don't necessarily i said today that way. now here is why. judge moore by their eyes in their hands. for every one can see that if you can feel. in other words the people make judgments based upon appearances. everyone sees but seems to be what few perceive what you are and those few who do, do not dare to contradict the opinion of the many who have a majesty of the state to defend them and

in the actions of all men and here we have coming up on one of those phrases, especially princes where there is no impartial arbiter. one must consider the final result. one must consider the final result. this is the passage that is often mistranslated and italian when literally one looks to the end. this is the passage that is often mistranslated that the end justifies the means which it doesn't. there is nothing about justification here. what the whole paragraphs are about or about necessity. let a prince therefore at to seize and maintain the state, his methods will always be judged on her boy and this is what the necessity is, to maintain the state. will always be judged honorable and will be praised by all. for ordinary people are always deceived by appearances and by the outcome of things. and in the world there is

nothing but ordinary people and there is no room for the few while many have a place to lean on. now, let me just finally say that this passage, which seems to be so condescending to many, to the impoverished, the masses, is in fact a rather strange comparison to what happens throughout the rest of the prince and in the discourses because you have to in the end ask, where does power come from? it doesn't actually come from the manipulation of appearances. that is what you do to maintain power. power ultimately columns for those very people who are being deceived. they are the source of power. throughout the prince where he talks about fortresses and when

he talks about invading foreign territories, when he talks about almost every other elements of power, ultimately derived from he says the people. there is a notion of popular sovereignty which permeates this past and it's certainly clear also in his other writings and i would argue what often we do is we mistake the sources of power with the techniques of maintaining the power and ultimately "the prince" must respect the people and if they hate him as machiavelli says several times in the prince, they will get rid of him. thank you. [applause] >> questions of power and justice are considered michael ignatieff work as print and broadcast journalist and scholar, as novelist, future and public official.

michael ignatieff is the author of 12 looks translated into 18 languages on subjects ranging from the political economy of the panel system and nationalism in the balkans in the political of facts facts in an age of war on terrorism. as a scholar, michael ignatieff has provided an eloquent defense of human rights framed in a way that acknowledges their origin in a particular time in a particular place. his work is not naïve about modern tyrannies that deny rights by violence or anthology. his work is not blind to the coercive and destabilizing elements of western campaigns and liberation. in human rights as politics and idolatry a book from 2001, he writes what i call humble humanism that bases universal rights unshared human capacitief

empathy and free will and on things that define the individual with economy and choice. as a novelist michael ignatieff writes the economy and penetrating human insight and gripping immediacy. his most recent novel is called charlie johnson into the flames about a journalist without illusions swept up in the violence of the war. he is motivated by a sense of justice that only he can bring and is destroyed. as a public figure, michael ignatieff has served on the independent international commission on kosovo ,-com,-com ma 1999 and 2000. he is of them a member of parliament of canada 2006 through 2011 and he was the leader of the liberal party of canada between 2009 and 2011. he is a member of the queens

private counsel for canada. he holds now a joint appointment at the monk school school of global affairs at the university of toronto and the kennedy school at harvard university. michael ignatieff. [applause] >> it's an enormous pleasure to be here in the far-off days when i was still an honest man, i got a ph.d. in history and it was kind of wonderful to listen to his story and again and here what only historians could do, which is to take a text like the prince and begin to understand all of the human conditions, the historical conditions in which it became possible, and i will i hope having heard from both of you such a fine description,

first of the renaissance context and then the sense of his afterlife, the two of you have given me a place to talk about the role of machiavelli and his relevance. if you have ever done politics, thought that would end interesting thing to do, what is it about a book written in 1513 that seems so seemingly relevant when you actually throw your hat into the political ring? what is it about this book more than on most any other book that we teach that seems to give a politician lessons you can't afford not to listen to? i am going to surprise you by not talking about exact week the same chapters about dissembling and about appearing in about lying, all the standard areas in which machiavelli appears to have such shocking relevance to

contemporary politics. i'm going to talk about one word in machiavelli and that is fortuna because i have to say when i was in politics, it was the first time i understood exactly what he meant by fortuna. fortuna in machiavelli's and, professor muir would do a better job telling you where fortuna comes from in the language of the renaissance but for me, fortuna is fortune, chance, contingency, look, fate and until you have actually been in electoral politics you really don't know what those words mean. and that i think will be my theme, which is that one of the things that make's machiavelli and during way relevant is his very unique grasp of time is a

factor in politics, and that is really what i want to talk about. one of the places, one of the most famous remarks about time in politics was made by british prime minister. you probably know this one, but it's one of my favorite stories. they asked harold macmillan who is a british prime minister between 1959 and the early 60's, what was the toughest thing about eating a prime minister? harold macmillan looked at the questioner for a while and said, events my boy, events. this is a deeply wise remark, one that machiavelli would have understood immediately. time is the medium in which politicians work and political judgment is a sense of timing.

the unique and specific genius of the great politician is a sense of when the time is right and when the time is not right, winn and ideas time has, and when and ideas time has gone, and of all the -- of politics makkah boley -- machiavelli's the one who understands that the most deeply in this deep understanding of time comes through famously in chapter 25 firms 1718, 19 and 20 and my heart was in my mouth. i thought professor muir was going to do chapter 25 and then i'd have nothing to say but in chapter 25, there is a wonderful long passage about fortuno which many of you will know when i will read a little bit from it. i compare her to one of those

torrential rivers that, when they get angry, break their banks, knocked down trees and buildings, strip the soil from one place and deposited somewhere else. everyone flees before everyone gets way in the face of their onrush. nobody can resist them at any point but although they are so powerful, this does not mean when the waters recede men cannot make repairs and build banks and barriers. so you have this famous image of the arnaud breaking its banks. fortune breaks like a violent river, and active nature. men plan and men dispose in men and women elder habitations and fortune breaks through and breaks apart the preventive structures, the institutions

that men create to master time, but notice there are two images at work here. first of all fortuna is like the arnaud flood. it's recurrent, it's unavoidable and it's unpredictable like hurricane sandy. but it's not province and one of the legs to understand his understanding of time is that fortuna is not providence. there is no guiding destiny here for tonight is as unpredictable as a natural disaster, but it's not guided by a benevolent or magnificent hand. one of the reasons set machiavelli is so shockingly modern is the sense of stuff happens, unpredictable, violent change occurs.

that's the world we are in. the minute you reid cavalli you are in our world, the world of the unpredictable, the end for siebel, the violence, the unforeseen and that seems to me from endlessly powerful and a modern aspect of machiavelli. but equally at the same time is this quotation shows, men are not prisoners of fortune. the whole burden of chapter 25 is to say yes, stuff happens. the unpredictable occurs. catastrophes occur. the arnaud overflows that men are not prisoners of this and they need not be resigned to their fate. a very strong emphasis and i think professor muir made this point about the tremendous importance of will and machiavelli, will against fortune, well against fate, will against chance, will against contingencies. these are tremendously strong

and powerful and resonant themes in subto. fortuna does not preach resignation. there is not a line of resignation and machiavelli's writing. politicians in other words or people in charge of public affairs in florence cannot predict the unpredictable. they can be sure when the arnaud is going to flood that they can put up things. they can persuade their fellow citizens to take action to do what they can to mitigate the impact of fortune, the impact of fate. they can prevent the worst, but they can channel the flood downstream, mitigate harm. and seek to control fortune to the degree that they can and do chapter ends with a notorious passage by the fortune being a woman.

it's a violent passage. it's an unattractive passage. other passages in machiavelli make it clear he had formidable respect as it happens for women as political actors, but the metaphor is there to say human will, in this case mescaline will can't control them predictable, can react to fate, to not have to submit to fate and contingency and chance with pious resignation. and so, that is a tremendously important element of his vision of what political life is about. political life is reacting to chance, to contingency, to fate. he lived it as our wonderful evocation of the context makes clear.

he is in power from 1498 to 1512 and certainly he is in jail and he is being hung up. he is being tortured and he is writing nearly a year later after he has had what for any human being is the most shocking experience contingency and misfortune, but he built it into his sense of politics. one minute you're up in one minute you're down. one minute fortune is shining on you and one minute you were in it jail cell begging for your life and hoping her words won't betray others. that is the sense of what political life is like, the radical meaningless even encounter by fortuna. but what is very i find inspiring anyway about machiavelli is the famous letter to vittori.

it's not a lament at his misfortune really. it's not a repining at fate. it's not a metaphysical inquiry into the mystery of time. he simply says, that's life. that is how we live. that is where we are. and that again sit seems to me is a profoundly modern view and i think crucially a non-tragic vision at the time and date non-tragic vision of political action. you get a much sharper vision of the tragic political action in politics as a vocation. machiavellianism is a scathing portrait of human folly but equal, it's a very very deep portrait of human stubbornness,

persistence, willingness to get back up on your feet after you have been dumped in the mud by the fate, by the fates and by fortune. it's a non-tragic vision of time in which men are rarely the equal of their times. but some men can be found to be the measure of their time. most men aren't, but some men step up. that is i think his deep sense of why human life is not tragic. some fools will fail but others will be found equal to their moment. he says at one point, since fortune changes and men stubbornly continue to behave in the same way, men flourish when their behavior suits the times and fail when they are out of step.

this is what professor muir was calling his ruthless pragmatism i think as a core of his attitude towards politics. the sense that success and failure in politics depends on having some mysterious alignment between your will and your intention and the times you live in, but you don't get to choose machiavelli is saying. you don't get to choose and you must never assume you can shape your times more than you think you can. deeply realistic, not even pessimistic, just this is where you are. don't get ideas above your station. don't think you can master your times. it's just when you think you have mastered your times someone will throw you in jail or you will lose an election or whatever it is. so these are elements in which i

am still enough of a historian to say this isn't machiavelli's modernity. he was writing from 1513 but when i read him having been through the experience of politics, i see a deep resonance and the aspects of politics which are infuriating and difficult. you are not the master of fortune. and if you think you are, you will fail. being aligned with your times is a crucial element of political success and failure and needless to say every political rascal who ever lived will blame his times and his lack of luck for his own and immorality or lack of courage and machiavelli is deeply aware of that are too killer ruse and exercise of exultation and god knows i have

done a bit of that, but you can't hide from niccolo. that is the great thing about that vote. you cannot hide from this cynical, and it is cynical, deeply realistic sense of what human beings are alike and what political action is like. let me move towards a conclusion other things that i pick up from machiavelli that connect to the sense of fortuna. a deep sense throughout the book that politics is local. yes it is true he is writing in dialogue. he is in dialogue with the ancients. he has a strong desire to use propositional meanings about politics that will endure but if you look at the text of the prince it is constantly, this is what sadr reyna got right and

this is what -- got wrong. he could be talking about the senate of the united states. it's all local. it worked in wyoming but it won't work in oklahoma. that incredibly dense sense of context is an important lesson in itself about how to understand politics. machiavelli is saying don't over theorize. all politics is local. the traditions, the meanings that drive and move political action are contextual to cities, contextual to cni, contextual to luca and contextual to rome. another thing that is so powerful and machiavelli is politics and character. outcomes that depend tremendously on what kind of person caesar borgia is and what kind of person so to reyna was and what kind of person the fryer was.

that deep sense of the driving factor of character is important. and politics as i said earlier is kind of the sense and machiavelli that you get everywhere that ideas are interesting yeah but a politicians job has nothing to do with ideas. it has to decide whether an idea is calm or whether an idea has gone, whether the moment is right, the sense of the moment, the sense of the decisive moment why machiavelli is so inextinguishable as a source of political inspiration is this emphasis on the contextual, the local, the moment, seizing the moment and losing the moment, being fortunate enough's friend or being on the wrong side of fortune and then finally a final point in our moment in and which is conventional in american politics and canadian politics

to lament conflicts, to lament partisanship, to lament amity of politics. machiavelli says, now boys and girls club of what do you think this stuff is? this is war by other means. stop fooling yourselves. conflict is integral to political life. it is the essence of political life and in relation to republican virtue one of the most surprising and i think heartening only important message is that you get from discourses is that one of the things that keep republics freed of the conflict between the elite and the nobles and the citizens, it's that conflict that is the source of our freedom. one of the things that comes through so strongly and machiavelli is you have to fight for your freedom. republics can visit and republics can regain it at but that conflict at the heart between the elites, privileged elites and the citizenry is the

driver of republican freedom and the minute you lose the desire to fight for your freedom you lose it. that seems to meme, that fissios is local and is the politics of the city, the politics of personality, the geniuses in politics or the people at this mysterious gift of knowing where fortune is going and that gift is always another key point in machiavelli, that gift of knowing where fortune is going is temporary. you have it in any lose it. there is no such thing as permanence and permanent genius in politics. what will work in one situation will not work in another and finally that since the conflict is integral to political action and normatively is integral to the preservation of freedom. these are aspects of machiavelli 's message which seemed to me to be of extraordinarily powerful influence certainly on us all

and on our vision of politics. thanks so much for listening. [applause] >> thank you both very much. we have time for some questions and i've been asked to say that you should hold your question until you are holding the microphone. so yes, a question right here. >> hi. my questions for the second speaker. i really appreciate your emphasis on for 10 and i think it's an integral part of rockabilly's work but i think the talk you have given doesn't express central concern machiavelli had for fortuna specifically fortune is a problem not because of the events but through prudence and we can stem the tide of those political. the problem seems to be death in

terms of ethanol is that we cannot prevent am when it is we are going to die. given that, we can prevent those things, i think perhaps we are little bit misguided in saying that machiavelli's picture of politics is one where he we might have some hope. in fact the discourse in the prince it seems like given that politics is made up of men and men are subject to the whims of fortune there is no way to overcome them and those political regimes no matter how well thought out they are are ultimately going to die as well. what do you think we can do with our understanding of fortunate events and you think there's something we can do once this picture of death -- [inaudible] >> that's a very powerful reading and it's very good to put the emphasis on death. it's very present in machiavelli but i think you should ask yourself, why would he bother to

write the prince and the discourses if he believed what you think he believes. that is i think he wrote these books because he believed that prudence armed with certain kinds of knowledge might be able in certain cases to forestall what you rightly described as something he was worried about, the inevitable decline and corruption of republics. a key element of machiavelli sense of time is the sense of the inevitable corruption of virtue and corruption of the republic. this is an old theme and a way of organizing understanding of time is the sense of all republics are threatened with corruption but i come away with i guess i'm more optimistic reading of machiavelli. god knows it's difficult to find consolation in his pages by the sense that that passage from

chapter 25, you can stop the river overflowing but you can damned the banks. that i think is crucial to his sense of being able to resist corruption, resists decline. you used the right word, use of prudence. he writes his books because he wants to strengthen the arms of prudence. i don't know -- >> that's right. that's a classic example. he does everything right. he follows all the rules and he dies. and so he loses that but i think michael is exactly right. you don't write a book that has no utility, that has no use for you or others and they think he was thinking about a very practical set of things you can do short of that.

before we die let's see what we can do. >> i had a question about one chapter that i don't think we have talked about yet which is the last chapter, which is always struck me as the most wildly utopian chapter in the entire book, that it's possible to do great deeds and all the people i've been praising in this book, moses, cyrus, theseus and romulus are just men like you. and the fact that they faced really horrible difficult situations, that just lets you display and then the one word we haven't talked about, you can then perform these virtuoso acts. so talk a little bit about what it means for him because it seems like it's absolutely crucial to what is going on in the book. >> well, chapter 26, the chapter

you are talking about was probably tacked on later so it would have ended with fortune as a woman passage. it was originally dedicated to giuliano who dies, bad fortune for him and changes the dedication to his other medici prince lorenzo and it's apparently at that time he calls on lorenzo to drive out the barbarians basically. it's a clarion call to arms, to liberate italy from domination. and it has a kind of yeah optimism about it but the opposite obviously throughout the prince, the force that you have to deal with fortune is virtue. fortune is a goddess and also gender fortuna feminine so she

is a woman. she is the goddess and the opposite is machiavelli understands not in the christian sense but as the roman warriors so that certainly fits with the passage we have been talking about in chapter 25 about the audacious young man. so which again we can understand in a variety of different ways in your own understanding of your own talent and your capacity to act boldly, courageously and with some degree of foresight, it's the only thing you've got to deal with this fortune and it permeates the text so there is really just -- machiavelli is about two things. the two mechanisms of history.

virtue and fortune. >> another question? >> i have a question i think where professors muir. i've always been interested in maybe it's because aristotle gives the same kind of advice is the tyrant what it means when machiavelli advises the prince to cultivate the appearances of for example mercy and i think this is in keeping with -- because it seems to me and this is really the question up on a political figure cultivates appearances they also have the kind of reality and can simply the words i suppose but what would it be to appear to be merciful except in some public way to be merciful at least in some particular way? i'm not sure if i am formulating my question quite sharply enough but i'm wondering but you take the notion of, the political leader appearing? is the also not imply a kind of

political reality? >> is a way of creating reality i think. the way i would think about it and the way they teach it is to compare the prince on this set of passages with the contemporary text which deals with how the court of the prince should behave and which there is truly articulated codes of behavior at the core of which is this famous word that he coins. ..

>> we think about social behavior for a few minutes and we all know that from childhood on mir trained not to express our emotions fully and directly all the time otherwise society would be in chaos. that is what is going on in some sense. you have to have a certain kind of demeanor to be "the prince" and by the late 16th century the phenomenon become so

widespread there is treated season after tree diseases treaties after tree these add dissimulation on this lee appeared to be something you are not? that is what is going on. >> you mentioned the founder of his own power except i am very confused use this -- moses had the wrath of god and if left to his own device would have been a shepherd.

>> is a good question. i wonder if we would have that reaction when we think about moses as a man of god machiavelli seeing this -- singles and not to be a man of god nothing to do with higher powers it is secular and part of the separation of politics and humans from the divine world. he had the right response. >> moses is actually quoted in machiavelli a lot. he is all over the place and quoted in the context usually and he is interested

in origen's, the beginning of law where he most often appears there is a book called mock of alien hell and it is his reading of the bible. he is a much more astute student of the bible then you would think from the passages in print. >> another question? >> of passage that has been intriguing to me was the discussion of weaponry bringing up david and saw giving his armor to david and it is not the right fit to run that is when he takes his stones and uses that as the metaphor to make sure

your armies are armed. i was just continuing to connect to questions in the sense of the ada to create a persona but it is too difficult but is there a sense of creating your own persona? >> it is to appear in such a way does not appear to be doing it doing something which is cultivated and the natural making it appear natural and as you suggest it is a spectrum but you really do it well you lose a sense with those of us of a

certain age to remember the advertisements about michael jordan and of course, when he made the jump shot hit seemed miraculous of course, the man must have spent years that is to a point* where to do it right to play the piano really well you cannot think about it. there is no thought or recognition this is the performance. i think that is what is talked about. >> you have to be capable of turning it off.

>> that would require some knowledge. >> one last question. >> with the point* of power and authority year to separate concepts how wall street can have a power base with you think machiavelli's judgment would be to amass such power despite the fact to give them the power. >> this was handed to me.

[laughter] i recall something at the end of my stock the aspects of the sociology the inequalities of wealth are a source of corruption and a threat to the survival of republics, other rich he beat are habitually subversive to democratic liberty he has a startling disabused or disenchanted view of wealth and magnificence said in a

machiavellian and the sociology of wealth it does not come by itself, it is just another form of power. that is a different view they and others sociologies of wealth and power of the same period. i think that is what i would say. i would not venture into wall street but what you can take from machiavelli is he is not impressed. he is not impressed by people who work in a helicopter or get eight figures at the end of the solvay but as a form of power separated from any authority. it was a strong point* from

what professor edward muir said machiavelli thinks it is the enormous -- enormous proposition comes from the people excuse me that is where he thinks authority comes from coming to the degree there is a 30 and machiavelli's world is -- his vision of the republic is not with the money, it is with the people and what i said his striking is his vision politics is being driven by economic conflict, a constant conflict and when the people stop fighting and opposing the power of the merely rich , the public is threatened and that part of what machiavelli said was a strong influence on the american republican tradition through madison,

the federalist, and they know what he was talking about. jefferson knew. >> levy invite you to join us immediately following and please thank our guests tonight. [applause] >> from the professor of harvard university author of representing the race tell me about your book. >> the collective biography of six african american civil-rights lawyers to practice law during the era of segregation and about their collective struggle with both civil rights and racial identity. it is about the fact to be african-american civil rights lawyer in this era is caught between the black and

white world both blacks and whites once things and these lawyers and identify with these lawyers. this kind of a of a lawyer thurgood marshall and people like kim not just the african-american lawyer but between the black and white world. >> how difficult was it to become a lawyer during this time? >> it is not difficult to become a lawyer, you have to go to law school, it does cost money but it is very difficult to succeed because no african-american lawyer will have white clients are very few will. most black people do not have a lot of money if you do you hire the white wear because they are more effective in a segregated society. so it is very, very difficult to succeed even though it is not difficult to become one.

>> why these six men? >> they were all one generation with the legal arm of the civil-rights movement just with the '50s and '60s these particular lawyers were at the apex of their careers and became the legal arm of the civil-rights movement. >> host: kenneth macke creation of the civil rights lawyer published by harvard university press.